


Three

by Gabri



Category: How to Train Your Dragon (Movies), Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Neglect, Parent-Child Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-29
Updated: 2014-12-29
Packaged: 2018-03-04 02:26:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2905814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gabri/pseuds/Gabri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack appears to him three times in his life: once when he’s small, once when Hiccup is first in love, and one last time to say goodbye. </p><p>Today is when they say goodbye.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three

Jack appears to him three times in his life: once when he’s small, once when Hiccup is first in love, and one last time to say goodbye. 

Today is when they say goodbye.

He knows completely that he is a product of his parents. It’s cruel and unusual that, the night before Jack’s smiling moon face appears for the third time, the sound of their voices is still ringing in his ears. His father doesn’t understand speaking softly. Even when he’s quiet, he snaps with the fierceness of dragon’s teeth. His mother is a force like the ocean. She’s soft at the corners, gentle, but there’s power in the entirety of her that only drowns him deeper and Hiccup knows already that his father has long since been pulled completely under. Her words are smaller than Stoick’s, but they roll into his brain and suffocate him. The scariest thing of all is that Stoick, his mountain-of-a-man father that will fight at the drop of a coin, has stopped fighting her completely.

It’s scary because Hiccup’s not sure when he’s stopped fighting Jack either, just that he’s given up in a different sense of the word.

It’s very late when he walks to Raven’s point, shivering cold, looking for him. He’s being inconvenient. But Jack knows already that he’s bothersome, and worse comes the worse he just won’t show and Hiccup can leave him with all the blame. 

The wait for the frost spirit is long and full of chattering teeth. One day, he thinks, blinking snowflakes out of his eyes, he’ll build himself an island twice as large and three times as efficient as Berk. In those two entire visits that Jack has graced him with (once small, half his size even, and once when he was first in love — what a stupid person he was) Jack had managed to both build and destroy every idea of home he’s ever settled on.

His father built their home. He built it for Val. There’s a fireplace, a bedroom, and a room for their son. For Hiccup. Stoick lives in it, mostly — Hiccup’s always out looking for bigger things, and Val leaves, again and again, and only comes back when there’s something there to take. So Stoick lives in the home he built for Val, and Hiccup scrapped all plans of the home he’d have liked to have built for Jack, because he’s not Stoick, and he’s not stupid, but he is his father’s son just as much as he is his mother’s and he can see already where this path is leading.

After about an hour, Jack shows. It’s the third time, and he looks exactly the same as he did the other two. Hiccup takes his hand, the soft palm, the ball joint knuckles. He wonders if there’s a God who smelts lesser Gods from metal and air, someone who twisted Jack from the sky itself and placed sapphire into his eyes. It stings the most that that supernatural glow has actually dimmed from behind his cocky smile. When Hiccup first saw him (he can still remember how he tilted his head back,) he was a fever-bright hallucination, a genius’s sketch preserved behind a glass panel. The second time, he knew him by all his flaws. His humor could turn from clouds to lightening. His anger stung like winter wind. He’s never held him, storm creature in his flurry of movement; Hiccup wondered once if he was untouchable.

He sees the way his father and mother fit into each other like puzzle pieces, the easy entwine of their fingers. But absence makes the heart grow fonder, and Val is always absent. That second time that Jack visited, Hiccup had loved him more than he thought possible. The third time, he proved the second wrong.

The hand in his grasp was as beautiful as it was from day one, all snowy and silver. His fingernails are filthy. They’re bitten down to stubs. He has no idea when Jack became so terrifyingly real in his hands, only now he’s just looking at him, eyebrows raised, smiling that cocky smile, and Hiccup knows he could wipe that smile off his face in a flash just by opening his stupid mouth which is exactly why he can’t.

There’s some kind of Limbo for people like him, who press themselves in repeating circles and make the same mistakes over and over again. There’s nothing he wants more than to squeeze Jack’s hand and pretend that in some other world, this could work. One day, he thinks, he’ll invent something as snowy-silver as Jack, as rough and polished and painfully untouchable, and he’ll spend forever just adjusting the cogs and stitching up the seams and then he can call that his and leave Jack to the wind where he belongs, up in the sky where Hiccup can’t follow, even on dragon-back.

So Hiccup says goodbye. And all the while he tries very hard not to think of Stoick, drowning beneath those waves of his mother’s cold love, and tries not to think of Val, shoving him away because she has better things to experience. He is his parent’s child: both of theirs.

When Hiccup returns home, Stoick and Val have already turned to sleep. Their whisper-shouting is done. The air is empty of everything, even wind. His paper and pencil are right there where he’s left them. It’s as if a storm has passed and left everything a few degrees colder, and he knows at once that Jack won’t find him a forth time.

So Hiccup picks up his pencil, and he draws. First it’s a face. Then it’s a suit. And then it’s a suit with no one inside of it, crafted from steel that can keep him warm and loveless, and blueprints for an empty room to fill with replacement parts.


End file.
